I was at a baseball game last night with several customers and prospects. It’s always interesting to see what their chief pain points and areas of concern are in their virtual environments. As expected the VMware licensing changes came up a bit, but as a much more minor irritant than recent tradepress would lead you to believe. It could be that recent news that it will change yet again tonight are helping to settle things down. Everyone seemed to understand VMware’s perspective of why it had to change.

So, what was top of mind? Challenges around ensuring performance and managing capacity in virtual environments are still difficult for IT leaders. Optimizing resource utilization for applications and business services is critical to the business. And with vSphere 5’s new pricing, optimizing capacity becomes even more important in controlling costs.

This kinda begs the obvious question… Why is this news? Isn’t this the same repetitive challenges that have been top of mind for organizations implementing virtualization since its inception? What makes this noteworthy is that all of the corporations that were present have a significant amount of experience with virtualization. They have very large environments, with very skilled virtual admins. If they have been facing these challenges for years,why do they still have these same common pain points?

The answer is both simple and complex: These are obviously not easy issues to solve, and companies are still having a difficult time finding the resources and time to properly address and resolve the problems in their environment. Over the course of the evening, several companies outlined key issues with people, processes and technology.

Here are a few key points to note:

Our existing customers have been progressing at a varying pace along the path to virtualization management maturity. By this I mean companies are able to adapt processes and business practices at different rates. Most commonly, this is due to workload and the relationship that IT has with the business.

Companies are applying low tech solutions to these larger concerns. For example, I am consistently seeing that corporations are still over provisioning by a factor of more than 30% on a very regular basis. They feel they have had to do this to avoid crippling business impacts when they run out of capacity. This allows them to mask the underlying challenge with very expensive short term solutions.

Things are changing (such as the VMware Licensing model) that are really calling some of these practices into question. This was very visible in the group in attendance last night.

Then, the discussion took a very positive turn, as our existing customers began highlighting for some of the new prospects present how Quest’s Virtualization Management solutions were helping them address these concerns. It’s always more interesting to me when a portfolio presentation can be made more interactive and have the discussion be driven by the attendees as they talk about their real life environments and how they address the challenges today.

To summarize the discussion:

Quest vFoglight can help with these challenges. With its strengths in virtualization monitoring and capacity management, vFoglight helps to right-size and optimize resource utilization across the entire virtual environment. vFoglight also helps administrators to:

Identify the pooled resources within a given cluster and find sub-optimized VMs within it

Optimize the allocation of CPU, vRAM and other resources to VMs to ensure you are operating at an efficient level(including operating below the pooled vRAM threshold)

Prevent performance problems overtime due to point in time resource optimization with proactive monitoring

With Quest vFoglight, you can resolve some of the key challenges in capacity management by identifying and right-sizing virtual machines (VM) with over-allocated CPU, memory and storage for vSphere 5 environments.

Overall, a good time was had by all at the baseball game,and the very dynamic discussion really reinforced many things that customers are able to depend on as they make use of the solutions Quest Software provides.